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Minority Report Blu-ray Explores Spielberg's Futuristic Vision

The Minority Report Blu-ray includes featurettes on the film's futuristic technology.Images courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment

He rarely does much in the way of DVD commentary, but director Steven Spielberg weighs in on the making of Minority Report as part of an hour-plus package of new bonus material packaged with Tuesday's Blu-ray re-release of the 2002 tech thriller.

Set in 2054, the Tom Cruise sci-fi flick follows a "precrimes" fighter charged with preventing murders before they occur.

Plotline aside, the Blu-ray disc shines a light on Minority Report's chief virtue by showing how Spielberg and his brain trust of futurists, inventors and designers created an array of technologies that anticipated real-world gadgets.

"The Future Realized" featurette, for example, describes the G-Speak (gesture interface technology) screen that enabled Cruise's character to manipulate information from a computer with a wave of the hand.

Developed for the movie by MIT graduate John Underkoffler, the "spatial operating environment" has become a fixture on cable TV news networks and is marketed by the inventor's Oblong Industries.

"We had this very clear brief from Steven Spielberg," production designer Alex McDowell told Wired.com in a phone interview. "He wanted a reality-based future rather than science fiction. That set in motion this process of building an interior logic that would drive how this world would function."

Tom Cruise gets a lift in Minority Report.

Another Blu-ray bonus: A previsualization clip sketches out the movie's "Maglev Chase" sequence, which features a 3,000-foot vertical drop. To come up with the magnetic levitation vehicle, McDowell, who more recently created the alt-world of Watchmen, says: "We basically combined an idea of an elevator and taxi cab into a single vehicle. Then we had to overcome the engineering problem: How does a vehicle travel both vertically and horizontally? By the time we worked all of that stuff out, we had a framework for a sequence that hadn't been written yet."

Priced at $30 ($20 on Amazon), the Minority Report Blu-ray package also includes a "Props of the Future" featurette, space-age commercials and a previz clip detailing the film's "Hoverpack" sequence.